Because reality is beautiful.

So, a quick explanation of why I haven’t written much. I realized the key to happiness. I tried to fight the realization. I tried to find holes in it. I tried to disprove it. But the more I thought about it the more I knew it was right.

Happiness is feeling powerful.

We are happiest when feeling powerful, and most miserable when feeling powerless.

We have shallow friendships because having people around that we feel better than makes us feel powerful. Shallow friendships (which will be the balance of most of the people we are friends with in this life) are like knick-knacks. They give something to do while you putter around, and make the place more interesting.

We have meaningful friendships because those are the few people who by their commitment to us enhance our power.

People form into groups to get access to power.

Religion is all about power. The question every religion answers is what must I do to have access to divine power?

Religious groups complain about the state of society because they look back to a time when they had more power, and feel the lose keenly.

I have very little power over the world.

I thought before I wanted to change the world. I can’t. It doesn’t mater what I think about abortion or murder or government. I don’t have the power to write policy so my beliefs about these things change nothing on the whole.

I’m not rich, I’m not famous, I’m not powerful. Thus no one cares what I think, particularly if I disagree with rich, famous people in positions of power.

The only things I have power over are not system wide, they effect mostly just me. I have some control over my attitudes, and much control over my actions. That’s it. There is no point in knowing a ton of stuff that I can’t do anything with.

Hello, I am a white, straight, male. This means I am the privileged member of the Patriarchy. When I first started reading feminist blogs the whole Patriarchy thing really pissed me off. It seemed this whole bugaboo with really bogus standards of existence: “Don’t believe in the Patriarchy? It’s because you are the Patriarchy!” I mean, I’m not sure that there isn’t a conspiracy which that couldn’t be applied to. “Don’t believe in the Reptilians? It’s because you are one!” “Don’t believe that Elvis is alive and the truth is being suppressed by a conspiracy? That’s because you are part of the conspiracy.”

Several (male) posters made this argument. A lot of the responses were vindictive, cruel, and not particularly helpful. With time, though, I heard some good data. First of all, that the concept of the Patriarchy is the most misunderstood concept in feminist thought. The Patriarchy as visualized is bunch of old white dudes with mutton chop side burns and full beards. They’re these semi-immortals that have been locked in a boardroom since 1885. They’re wearing old suits, sitting in overstuffed leather chairs. There’s mounted endangered species everywhere from antelope to zebra. The guy at the head of the table leans back in his chair and pulls a long drag on his huge, expensive cigar.

“Boys,” he says with British accent, “we gotta do something about these feminists!”

General “Harrumphs!” ensue. The men smoke cigars and drink bourbon from crystal glasses as they control and manipulate the whole world, sliding little brass tokens across a sepia world map.

The truth is both simpler and more complicated. There is no boardroom. This is not a conspiracy of the grand sort, this is a conspiracy of peers. Friends take care of friends. People feel most comfortable with people that look like them, act like them, value what they value. That’s the basis of a whole lot of ‘isms, racism and sexism most obviously. It’s not a purposefully conspiracy, it just happens. Life is series of choices. When we don’t force ourselves to think about, we make choices that are helpful to people like us. The people that aren’t like us don’t quite advance as fast as we do. With time, people think the backwardness of the people who “aren’t like us”, is accepted, a given. It’s the way it was meant to be. Then come moral statements. They’re like that because they are morally inferior. They don’t advance because lack the moral fiber it takes to succeed. Because we don’t hold them down on purpose, it seems like the most reasonable explanation for their failure is themselves.

The Patriarchy is the end result of this advancing people just like us. The tiny, top of the pyramid of exploitation. The reason that most people in charge of the world are white, straight, and male. I am member of this privileged class. I get that now, and I accept it.

But it would wrong to feel guilty for it. I didn’t choose to be born the straight, white, male child of two college educated parents. That which I did not chose, I will not apologize for. I didn’t do anything wrong. Now, if I use this position of privilege that fate granted me to fatten myself at the expense of others less fortunate, then I have done something wrong. I have become the exploiter. But on the other hand, I did not make this world. I am not the person who said a white, straight, male’s opinion was more valuable than other peoples’. And I will not take my “bully pulpit” and ignore it. Me not using the position of privilege I have as the person I am to make the world a better place, would be as wrong as me refusing to walk just because there are people out there who can’t.

I admit it. Society privileges me. And I vow to use that for good, and not evil, and never to feel guilty for it.

Well, I am deeply enjoying talking to Tekknorg about the issue of nuclear power. I’m not sure if any one else is reading these posts, but we are having a spirited discussion.

So, I make this (hopefully final) post. Conveniently for me (and my ignored family) this post does not require 4 hours of research.

First, Nuclear weapons. The problem is, they don’t work. I don’t mean they don’t work in a literal sense of physics; they work quite well. I mean they are almost useless as weapons. Atomic warfare is the ultimate kamikaze attack. A big nuke would kill as many of the people shooting it as the people getting hit by it. While the people getting hit would die instantly, and the people doing the hitting would die over a decade, using nuclear weapons is like bulimia: suicide on the installment plan.

I am NOT a pacifist. I believe the statement, “Violence is never an option” is an apology for mass murder and slavery. There are some times when violence is, undoubtedly, the right solution to a problem. There are many times when violence is not the solution and will only make the problem worse, but never the less, sometimes violence is right and good The moral acceptability of violence is rooted in self defense, as part of the larger picture of self determination.

If the defender inflicts as much damage on himself, or the same damage with more suffering, then his act was not moral, but immoral. When violence is inflicted usefully for defense, it is moral. When a defender commits an act of violence so great that both he and the aggressor are harmed equally, then the defender is being ruled not by a reasoned desire for self defense, but a hatred so great his own misery is of no cost as long as the aggressor suffers as well. Vengeance and hate are NOT acceptable reasons for violence.

For this reason I say the use of nuclear weapons is immoral and stupid.

Nuclear weapons are made from nuclear materials. Nuclear materials come from nuclear reactors. Many proponents of nuclear power will claim that is not true, that the kind of nuclear reactors which make electricity don’t make the materials needed for weapons. This is somewhat true. But one reactor’s nuclear waste is another’s fuel for producing heat, electricity, and some weapon’s grade materials.

Fortunately, the reverse is also true. One reactor’s weapon’s grade byproduct is another reactor’s fuel.

Nuclear reactors do not make nuclear weapons. People make nuclear weapons. Nuclear reactors produce materials which people may put to moral or immoral uses depending on their personal temperament, opportunity, and social environment.

Is the nuclear power process dangerous? Absolutely. Does it involve risk? Absolutely. Are there greater risks to not having nuclear power? Absolutely. Soviet Russia was not known for its restraint in dealing with unrest in far off regions or within her own people. There were genocides and wars of opportunity which no democratic society would have embraced. Thousands, perhaps millions of Russia’s own sons and daughters died in Siberia. Aid was given to rebels to destabilize shaky governments. But not once, did the USSR ever deploy a nuclear weapon. Because the Americans had them too.

No chemical is moral or immoral, only people are moral or immoral. Perhaps someday, we, the naked apes, will drop our spears. Until that day, I want to make sure moral men appointed by functioning democracies have access to the same weapons as immoral men who rule by force.

You can no more ask a human being to not make a tool he might need than you can ask a female wolf not to go into heat, or a male ape to not defend his territory. And for the same reason; this is the way these species are. Living in a fantasy where laws and regulations and rules and disapproval can change the behavior of an animal (which man is) is a wonderful place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. While we are all waiting for man to evolve into the sort of animal that doesn’t need weapons, we sit on a pile of refined nuclear materials.

What do we do with them? We have these metals which if assembled properly can kill every man, woman, and child on earth and possible the earth herself. At any time, they could be stolen by some new dictator, terrorist, or other type of fool. What can we do?

Burn them up. Transmute the admittedly dangerous chemicals into less dangerous ones, and use the surplus power to make electricity. Electricity for all the pointless, useless, life robbing “convinces” which surround us, it’s true. But also electricity for the research labs which create new cures everyday. Electricity for the computers which save billions of hours of human life every day. Electricity for schools, for hospitals, for heat without CO2, and travel without fossil fuels.

I have not said this is the prettiest answer, just the only one which works. I don’t like nuclear power, and I despise nuclear weapons, but I dislike the available alternatives significantly more.

I’m reading about nuclear power. A fellow blogger wrote a post on the general coolness of pebble bed reactors, and I’ve been trying to “get” the whole nuclear power thing. It’s strange to find what’s out there. I had no idea there were so many types of reactors, or fuel methods, or methods of operation.

And I hate to admit this…they scare me a little.

I pride myself on being able to divorce my emotions from a topic of consideration, but emotions exist for a reason. We tend to think humans are unique in having emotions (we’re not) or that emotions are useless (they’re not). Emotions help us make decisions in the absence of meaningful data. Survivors of traumatic brain injuries who have received injury to the emotive part of the brain find it very difficult to do simple things. They excel at things such as playing chess, but may struggle for hours to do something as simple as step into a room. Without an “Emotioner” they can’t determine the value of the data they receive, so the angle in which they cross a threshold is of equal importance to them as things like oxygen and not starving to death.

So, I am nervous about nuclear power not because I can’t get any data; far from, I am awash in data. The problem is deciding the relative value of each datum.

Some of the most common “facts” about nuclear power are, in fact, bologna. For instance:

Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was plain, old-fashioned boiler explosion in a pressure vessel which had nuclear materials in it. The same thing would happen if you took World War I locomotive, and put uranium in it, for the same cause and reason: heat something which is cooled by boiling water, let the water run out, and it blows up.

Chernobyl did not release more 30 times fallout of Hiroshima. It didn’t release any “times” more of anything. The differences between the two are large enough you can’t really pin it down with a mathematically precise comparison. You might be able to say “…the calculated mass of fallout from Hiroshima following a nuclear explosion was roughly a 1/30 the calculated mass of the total sum of all the radioactive materials that were vaporized without a nuclear explosion in the steam explosion and following fire at Chernobyl.” But even that is pretty misleading. A lot of the mass of Chernobyl had a half life measured in seconds. That is to say, in less than a minute, it was totally harmless.

Three mile island was a total non issue. Due to stupidity and laziness on the part of both plant designers and plant operators, the first three fail safes didn’t work. The forth kicked in fine, and there was still 5 and 6 to go. Was “radioactive material” released into the environment? Yes. About 6 bananas worth. Every person reading this who isn’t a nuclear scientist just went HUH??? Bananas are full of potassium. Totally naturally, some potassium is radioactive. The amount of radioactivity released was about the same as the total radioactivity of 6 everyday bananas, per capita.

The standard anti-terrorism yardstick is now “747 resistance.” No one will put it in those words, but in all seriousness, it is everybody’s terrorism related question. So yes, reactors are 747 resistant. The part of the reactor made to withstand high-pressure and high temperature from the inside will do about as well from the outside.

The kind of reactors which are the best at making a lot of electricity are totally incapable of making materials for nuclear weapons. This is not because of regulation, this is because of the inescapable laws of physics. You have a better chance of making nuclear materials in your backyard with home made equipment. Read the Radioactive Boyscout if you don’t believe me.

But then there is the other side…

However, the above much touted fact sort of obscures this one: the reactors which are pretty good at making power are also pretty good at making new fissionable materials. Many of these fissionable materials are only useful for electrical production, but some are the type needed for nuclear weapons, and sometimes (depending on the reactor type) these materials are presented in a relatively convenient way. (Note that this is how India got the material to build their bomb. They got this from a totally normal US/Canadian experimental reactor, which makes about 10 Kilograms of Plutonium a year.) England had a reactor commonly called a Magnox reactor. France, and North Korea use an identical design. It makes a lot of electric power and a lot of weapon grade material. The Magnox reactors is what the UK used to build their entire nuclear arsenal.

The reality of nuclear material recycling is this: we can recycle huge quantities of nuclear material. Nuclear physics allows us the near magical ability to transmute waste into fuel and use it again. So called “breeder reactors” are real and usable. In fact, they are used all the time. See above. The insurmountable fact, mentioned above, is the recycling process produces weapons grade materials. Now these weapons grade materials can be used in the right kind of reactor to make electricity, and more waste which can go back to the breeder reactor and continue the process. It’s fascinating, its exciting, and hopefully we can do it some day. But don’t be misled, it does mean weapons grade material.

Reactors ARE NOT “coal plants with nuke plants instead of coal burners.” Yes, the generator side of a nuclear power plant is identical to coal plants. Even the “feed water” pumps, without which, both coal plants and nuke plants will have catastrophic steam explosion are identical. But the differences come up immediately. When coal plants explode, radio active materials are not released into the air. Many reactors operate in non-intuitive ways. The Chernobyl reactor is a good example. If you cooled it off very quickly, it flushed out all the radioactive materials which had damped the reaction, and the reactor suddenly became more reactive. The Chernobyl reactor didn’t explode until they tried to keep it from exploding, after hours spent trying to make it explode. Seriously. Nuke plants are different.

Now this is the non-nuclear part and where my emotions come into play. People are stupid. I believe there is about 1 out of 10,000 people in the world who can truly create. That leaves 9,999 who are all destroyers. And at least 1 out of 10,000 of those disassemblers is a Newton or Einstein in their particular line of work.

When you read about nuclear reactors you will run into the words “Intrinsically Safe.” And that’s stupid. Three Mile Island was considered to be intrinsically safe…until it wasn’t. There is no such thing as “Intrinsically Safe.” My brother worked in a window factory. He ran a machine that had 6 “deadman” controls on it. (A deadman is a switch that shuts off if the person holding it is injured or killed.) This particular machine had a deadman for each foot, each hand, and each knee. You activated the moving part of it with you right knee, after holding down every other switch. In the 50’s this same machine had one foot switch. You loaded the material in and hit the switch. The reason the 90’s version had 6 switches was because consistently, over the years, people somehow kept getting one body part or another somehow injured.

Nuclear power will never be “intrinsically safe”. The cross roads of radioactive isotopes, high pressure/high temperature gases, huge machinery, and human frailty will aways be a dangerous intersection. Nuclear power is risky and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. The question is, “How does the risk of nuclear power stack up against other risks in this crazy life?” Quite well, actually. Thousands of people die every year in coal mining accidents. Around 40,000 die a year from car accidents alone. Life is a constant game of risk management. The winners get to add to the gene pool; the losers do not.

In the end, I guess my observation is this:

You can’t diffuse a bomb after it goes off. Magical thinking tells us that if we wish enough against something it will go away. Nuclear energy will never go away. Ever. If some killer virus killed all the human beings, in x number of years, a new species say, Proboscidea Sapiens (sentient elephants) will develop. They will have their Hiroshima. Even without us, nuclear power will be discovered. We need to accept the fact we have the power to kill ourselves, and choose not to. Prohibiting nuclear weapons while encouraging nuclear energy is not possible. Not because the reactors have to make the material. They don’t. It’s impossible because that’s the way man is.

Abstinence kills. Countries which teach “abstinence only” sex ed to their teens have the highest teen pregnancy. Regions which require total abstinence from hand guns have higher gun crime than nearby regions which are do not have total abstinence from hand guns. Total abstinence from alcohol (a.k.a. The Prohibition) reduced total alchohol consumption by only 60% (remember this was a total ban) and created organized crime. Countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands which have the least restrictions on pornography have some of the lowest crime rates against women.

I say again TOTAL ABSTINENCE KILLS. Total abstinence NEVER, EVER, comes from a rational mind. Total abstinence is an intrinsically unreasonable standpoint which says, “Even a little bit of ‘whatever’ is infinitively worse than anything that might be inflicted upon us to ‘protect’ or ‘free’ us from it.” People have drives. If abstinence doesn’t keep people from smoking, drinking, using drugs, masturbating, hitting women, killing people, or getting pregnant, I doubt, very seriously, it will prevent the drive to dominate a neighboring country and take their stuff by any means necessary.

We don’t need a ban on reactors that can make weapons grade nuclear materials. We need education starting at a grade school level on how energy works, nuclear and otherwise. Raise a generation of rationalists and nuke plants will be built and staffed by good people. Keep doing what we are doing and nuke plants, and anything else we need, will be prevented by legions of superstitions, fearful, illogical people who think they can make a problem go away by not liking it hard enough.